When we’re struggling with addiction and mental illness, one of our greatest challenges is how disconnected we’ve become, from other people, from our families and communities, but even more so from ourselves. We’ve lost our connectedness to our inner selves, to the light that is within us. We’ve become disconnected from our purpose in life. We’ve been neglecting our interests and passions. We’ve started to feel unfulfilled and unsatisfied in our lives. We lack motivation and direction. We feel lost, confused about our place in the world, and totally overwhelmed. When we’re this disconnected, we have a hard time finding peace, within ourselves, in our relationships, and in our daily lives. We use our addictions to try to numb the pain we feel from this lack of connection. Our addictions fuel our disconnectedness, and vice versa.
One solution for our struggles with addiction can be working to repair our feeling of connection. We want to reconnect with ourselves. We want to feel comfortable and at peace within ourselves. We want to shed our inner divisiveness and discord. We want to heal the inner turmoil and confusion we’ve been suffering from. How can we reconnect with ourselves so that we can recover fully from our intense suffering?
Some powerful ways of forging connection with our inner selves are meditation, energy healing and writing. When we meditate, we access the stillness and spaciousness that naturally reside within us, that we cover up with layers of toxic and unhealthy habits. We can meditate with breathing exercises, visualization, affirmations, walking meditation, and by incorporating meditative practices and mindfulness into our daily routines. Energy healing, like meditation, unites mind, body and spirit so that we can approach our healing holistically and achieve profound transformation. We can connect to the pain that is in our mind, our heart, our spirit, and our bodies so that we can lean into it, feel it, and let it move through us as we heal. Similarly, writing allows us to uncover our deep pain and process it therapeutically. As we write, we’re processing the pain that has lived under the surface, often underneath our conscious awareness, stored in our subconscious mind. Writing allows it all to come to the surface so that we can finally confront it and stop allowing it to hurt us.
Working on our internal connectedness is one of the best solutions to our problems with addiction and mental illness. When we are disconnected from the truth of who we are, we create more opportunity for our addictions to overtake our lives and our spirits. As we heal and strengthen our connection to self, we empower ourselves to reclaim our lives and create the future we want for ourselves.
Riverside Recovery is committed to helping you get back the life you love. Our treatment programs include multiple forms of therapy, family workshops and mindfulness-based relapse prevention education. Call (800) 871-5440 for more information.